In today’s Internet-powered world, smart entrepreneurs and small businesses are growing faster and becoming stronger with every passing day. So, to stay on top of your business endeavor you need to master some of the great tools that will make all the difference in your small business success.

To beat the competition in your industry you need to implement the tools that will increase the productivity and efficiency of your team and provide you time to focus on the most important aspects of your business.

There are hundreds of marketing related, services related and modern technology related tools available online to help you grow your business. However, to choose the best ones you have to put a lot of time and efforts.

So, to save you from that hassle we have reviewed and listed 11 of the best business tools that are cost-effective and provide great values to your business.

#1 Hootsuite

Managing all social media accounts regularly and publishing new posts frequently can become an area of concern for small business owners and entrepreneurs simply due to lack of time and proper resources. After signing up for Hootsuite you can manage all your social media platforms with its simple and easy to use dashboard.

Features:

Schedule post - You can schedule your upcoming social media posts in advance which will save you a lot of time and will keep you active on various social media channels.

Analyze the performance - You can analyze your social media performance by tracking the number of followers you are getting, your most shared and liked posts by your audience.

Find content - With Hootsuite you can find lots of attractive and compelling content and images which you can post on your social media channels to engage your visitors.

Security - Hootsuite prevents your brand from all sorts of social media threats by providing its advanced social media security features.

Pricing:

3O Days free trial.

Professional Plan - 29$ per month

Business Plan - 599$ per month

#2 Slack

Slack is a communication and teamwork management tool. Slack lets you manage project works and conversation with your business partners or team members from a single platform across all devices. Using slack you can send emails, reply to text messages and follow up someone on Twitter without any headache.

Features:

You can divide your team members according to their profiles, projects to properly monitor the work of your organization.

Collaborate and share your channel with the companies and businesses you frequently work with to expand your business network.

Make conversation over voice or video calls and share screen to track the progress of projects.

With the help of slack, you can effortlessly share files, images, videos, PDFs with others and make an archive of feedback of your work.

Pricing:

Free version

Standard - 6.67$ per month

Plus - 12.50$ per month

#3 Evernote

Evernote is a note-taking application which is very helpful for busy business owners and entrepreneurs. It lets you take notes of business-related ideas, plans, thoughts from anywhere in the world. Further, you can save the notes, audio recordings, photos, clipped web documents etc. in an organized way so that you can find them later easily.

Features:

You can write your notes, collect web clippings and page screenshots, record audio notes, create a to-do list, highlight or comment on images.

Sort your documents and important files by date, tag or title to arrange them properly.

Share your notes with anyone in your business group.

You can set permission-lock to prevent anyone from accessing your personal notes.

You can convert your notes to a PowerPoint presentation with one click.

Pricing:

Basic - Free version

Premium - 7.99$ per month

Business - 14.99$ per month

#4 Trello

Trello is one of the most popular projects management software to organize and track the progress of any project in your organization. You can create various cards, boards, set deadlines, add notes using your Trello account.

Features:

Organize and plan collaborations with clients, colleagues, business owners.

Customize your account with various tags, labels, cards, and categories.

Upload various files and attachments.

The mobile-friendly

With its free version you can access some basic services, but for other advanced features, you have to subscribe to their premium plans.

Pricing:

Free forever plan.

Business class - 9.99$ per month

Enterprise - 20.83$ per month

#5 Shopify

Shopify is an e-commerce software that helps you build an online e-commerce shop of your own. With the help of its marketing, drop shipping, shopping carts, SEO features you can manage all the functionalities of your online store from a single platform.

Features:

You can use top quality themes for your website from its collection of more than 70 professional themes.

With the help of its easy-to-customize templates, you can customize your online store according to your choice and build your brand online.

You can integrate your Shopify store with more than 100 payment gateways across the globe.

You can offer free shipping services to your customers for a certain order size and price point.

Pricing:

14 Days of the free trial.

Basic - 29$ per month

Advanced - 299$ per month

#6 Skype

Skype is the world's one of the most used and recommended internet calling services offered by Microsoft. It provides audio and video calling services, messaging, file and screen sharing between computers and mobile devices across the world.

Features:

Calling service - You can connect with your friends, families, business members, colleagues with the Skype calling service for absolutely free. You can even make a group-call with up to 25 people at once.

Video service - You can chat through video calls and virtually interact with others face to face.

File sharing service - You can share documents, images, videos etc. of any size. At the same time, you can share your screen with others to track the progress of any task.

Pricing:

Skype is free

Skype for Business is not free

#7 Asana

Asana is a productivity tool to manage your works, projects, and daily tasks. This tool helps you grow your business and improve the efficiency of the team members.

Features:

Plan your tasks and prioritize them according to the deadlines, and share them with the team members.

With Asana you can track the project improvement in every step to achieve your certain business goals.

As Asana connects with Google Drive, Dropbox, Onedrive you can easily share files and documents from your computer.

Pricing:

Premium - 9.99$ per month

Business - 19.99$ per month

Enterprise - Contact sales team

#8 Boomerang

Boomerang for Gmail is an email-communication tool to improve the email service. It provides you with an option to schedule emails and monitor their performances.

Features:

Using Boomerang, you can write your emails and schedule them to send at your preferred time.

At times there are some important emails we need to send or receive. Using its reminder feature you can easily send, receive or follow up with people.

Boomerang is also available for Android and iOS devices. This lets you stay connected over email on the go.

Pricing:

Basic - Free

Personal - 4.99$ per month

Premium - 49.99$ per month

#9 Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the best analytical tools which has loads of features to improve any website’s performance. There are some of the best features available in Google Analytics which every marketer and small business owners must know to grow their businesses.

Features:

You can track your campaigns and monitor the traffic on your website. Further, you can analyze their activities on different pages of your site.

You can track the leads and conversions of your website by the number of requests for the product demos, email sign-ups, ebook downloading, contact form submissions, purchases etc. This will help you to target your customers according to their interests.

You can create custom reports with the Google Analytics data according to your business goals.

Provides full customer assistance and builds relationships with your customers.

The free version of Hubspot provides basic marketing facilities whereas the paid version gives you many other advanced marketing features.

Hubspot is available for Windows, Mac as well as for Android and iOS devices.

Pricing:

Free version

Starter - 50$ per month

Enterprise - 3,200$ per month

#11 Paypal

Paypal is one of the most used and trusted online payment service providers. Using Paypal you can make and receive payments for your business in more than 100 currencies. It is one of the fastest and safest payment options available online.

Features:

You can make payment for any online purchases using the credit card, debit card, online banking etc. or send money to another PayPal account in 100+ different currencies.

You can withdraw your payments from more than 200 countries using PayPal.

You can request payments from people who don’t have a PayPal account using an email address.

Pricing:

Free sign up.

3.7% of the transaction amount plus $0.30 USD

Conclusion:

Hope you have found this article helpful. Though there are plenty of tools available today, the tools we have mentioned here will fulfill most of your business requirements. Most of the aforesaid tools offer free trials, so you can include those tools in your business plan to check their effectiveness. And as your business gets bigger, you can go for the paid versions that fit your budget and resolve your business needs.

Hootsuite is the best tool to manage your social media accounts & Google Analytics for getting the detail analysis of your website traffic. These both tools are very important for every startup company and I will recommend everyone to use these tools.

Indeed that is also great, Even somehow i changed my startup venture social media managing from CoSchedule to Sprinklr they're also great platforms to use for startup business communication managing purpose.

Hello! This is a terrific post, I did not think that I could get so much useful information at once. When I saw I thought that I would not read so much, but having started it, I was already unstoppable, this is what I need. Thankful to you. You gave me a lot of useful tools.

Very useful list of tools. I also use many of the above mentioned solutions.

Also in my business I actively communicate with customers through text messaging with the help of TextMagic software. In any case, it is really interesting to see which popular apps people use daily for business.

You are right james.becker. Messenger based customer-communication is fast, effective, and smart. We too are using similar tools and chat-bots to make customer-conversations more streamlined, centralized, and on-the-go.

Great list! I've been using Hootsuite for years and can definitely say it saves so much time. My results with Hootsuite have gotten even better since I've been using nothing but video content to share, and I'd like to include Video Jaguar to this list as it's the easiest way to create marketing videos for your business.

Thanks for the great informative post. Hootsuite, Google Analytics and HubSpot are the most important tools for business peoples. Because those tools are helping to manage social media accounts, website traffics and sources, etc. Overall the listed 11 tools are useful for both entrepreneurs and startup companies.

In today’s Internet-powered world, smart entrepreneurs and small businesses are growing faster and becoming stronger with every passing day. So, to stay on top of your business endeavor you need to master some of the great tools that will make all the difference in your small business success.

To beat the competition in your industry you need to implement the tools that will increase the productivity and efficiency of your team and provide you time to focus on the most important aspects of your business.

There are hundreds of marketing related, services related and modern technology related tools available online to help you grow your business. However, to choose the best ones you have to put a lot of time and efforts.

So, to save you from that hassle we have reviewed and listed 11 of the best business tools that are cost-effective and provide great values to your business.

#1 Hootsuite

Managing all social media accounts regularly and publishing new posts frequently can become an area of concern for small business owners and entrepreneurs simply due to lack of time and proper resources. After signing up for Hootsuite you can manage all your social media platforms with its simple and easy to use dashboard.

Features:

Schedule post - You can schedule your upcoming social media posts in advance which will save you a lot of time and will keep you active on various social media channels.

Analyze the performance - You can analyze your social media performance by tracking the number of followers you are getting, your most shared and liked posts by your audience.

Find content - With Hootsuite you can find lots of attractive and compelling content and images which you can post on your social media channels to engage your visitors.

Security - Hootsuite prevents your brand from all sorts of social media threats by providing its advanced social media security features.

Pricing:

3O Days free trial.

Professional Plan - 29$ per month

Business Plan - 599$ per month

#2 Slack

Slack is a communication and teamwork management tool. Slack lets you manage project works and conversation with your business partners or team members from a single platform across all devices. Using slack you can send emails, reply to text messages and follow up someone on Twitter without any headache.

Features:

You can divide your team members according to their profiles, projects to properly monitor the work of your organization.

Collaborate and share your channel with the companies and businesses you frequently work with to expand your business network.

Make conversation over voice or video calls and share screen to track the progress of projects.

With the help of slack, you can effortlessly share files, images, videos, PDFs with others and make an archive of feedback of your work.

Pricing:

Free version

Standard - 6.67$ per month

Plus - 12.50$ per month

#3 Evernote

Evernote is a note-taking application which is very helpful for busy business owners and entrepreneurs. It lets you take notes of business-related ideas, plans, thoughts from anywhere in the world. Further, you can save the notes, audio recordings, photos, clipped web documents etc. in an organized way so that you can find them later easily.

Features:

You can write your notes, collect web clippings and page screenshots, record audio notes, create a to-do list, highlight or comment on images.

Sort your documents and important files by date, tag or title to arrange them properly.

Share your notes with anyone in your business group.

You can set permission-lock to prevent anyone from accessing your personal notes.

You can convert your notes to a PowerPoint presentation with one click.

Pricing:

Basic - Free version

Premium - 7.99$ per month

Business - 14.99$ per month

#4 Trello

Trello is one of the most popular projects management software to organize and track the progress of any project in your organization. You can create various cards, boards, set deadlines, add notes using your Trello account.

Features:

Organize and plan collaborations with clients, colleagues, business owners.

Customize your account with various tags, labels, cards, and categories.

Upload various files and attachments.

The mobile-friendly

With its free version you can access some basic services, but for other advanced features, you have to subscribe to their premium plans.

Pricing:

Free forever plan.

Business class - 9.99$ per month

Enterprise - 20.83$ per month

#5 Shopify

Shopify is an e-commerce software that helps you build an online e-commerce shop of your own. With the help of its marketing, drop shipping, shopping carts, SEO features you can manage all the functionalities of your online store from a single platform.

Features:

You can use top quality themes for your website from its collection of more than 70 professional themes.

With the help of its easy-to-customize templates, you can customize your online store according to your choice and build your brand online.

You can integrate your Shopify store with more than 100 payment gateways across the globe.

You can offer free shipping services to your customers for a certain order size and price point.

Pricing:

14 Days of the free trial.

Basic - 29$ per month

Advanced - 299$ per month

#6 Skype

Skype is the world's one of the most used and recommended internet calling services offered by Microsoft. It provides audio and video calling services, messaging, file and screen sharing between computers and mobile devices across the world.

Features:

Calling service - You can connect with your friends, families, business members, colleagues with the Skype calling service for absolutely free. You can even make a group-call with up to 25 people at once.

Video service - You can chat through video calls and virtually interact with others face to face.

File sharing service - You can share documents, images, videos etc. of any size. At the same time, you can share your screen with others to track the progress of any task.

Pricing:

Skype is free

Skype for Business is not free

#7 Asana

Asana is a productivity tool to manage your works, projects, and daily tasks. This tool helps you grow your business and improve the efficiency of the team members.

Features:

Plan your tasks and prioritize them according to the deadlines, and share them with the team members.

With Asana you can track the project improvement in every step to achieve your certain business goals.

As Asana connects with Google Drive, Dropbox, Onedrive you can easily share files and documents from your computer.

Pricing:

Premium - 9.99$ per month

Business - 19.99$ per month

Enterprise - Contact sales team

#8 Boomerang

Boomerang for Gmail is an email-communication tool to improve the email service. It provides you with an option to schedule emails and monitor their performances.

Features:

Using Boomerang, you can write your emails and schedule them to send at your preferred time.

At times there are some important emails we need to send or receive. Using its reminder feature you can easily send, receive or follow up with people.

Boomerang is also available for Android and iOS devices. This lets you stay connected over email on the go.

Pricing:

Basic - Free

Personal - 4.99$ per month

Premium - 49.99$ per month

#9 Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the best analytical tools which has loads of features to improve any website’s performance. There are some of the best features available in Google Analytics which every marketer and small business owners must know to grow their businesses.

Features:

You can track your campaigns and monitor the traffic on your website. Further, you can analyze their activities on different pages of your site.

You can track the leads and conversions of your website by the number of requests for the product demos, email sign-ups, ebook downloading, contact form submissions, purchases etc. This will help you to target your customers according to their interests.

You can create custom reports with the Google Analytics data according to your business goals.

Provides full customer assistance and builds relationships with your customers.

The free version of Hubspot provides basic marketing facilities whereas the paid version gives you many other advanced marketing features.

Hubspot is available for Windows, Mac as well as for Android and iOS devices.

Pricing:

Free version

Starter - 50$ per month

Enterprise - 3,200$ per month

#11 Paypal

Paypal is one of the most used and trusted online payment service providers. Using Paypal you can make and receive payments for your business in more than 100 currencies. It is one of the fastest and safest payment options available online.

Features:

You can make payment for any online purchases using the credit card, debit card, online banking etc. or send money to another PayPal account in 100+ different currencies.

You can withdraw your payments from more than 200 countries using PayPal.

You can request payments from people who don’t have a PayPal account using an email address.

Pricing:

Free sign up.

3.7% of the transaction amount plus $0.30 USD

Conclusion:

Hope you have found this article helpful. Though there are plenty of tools available today, the tools we have mentioned here will fulfill most of your business requirements. Most of the aforesaid tools offer free trials, so you can include those tools in your business plan to check their effectiveness. And as your business gets bigger, you can go for the paid versions that fit your budget and resolve your business needs.

Search for answers

Ask the community

Most of the time, you just want to find content that has a particular phrase. Here are the easiest ways to find the content you want.

Enclose your search phrase in quotes. Search will try to find content with those words in the order you enclosed them. A search for "marketing advice" is going to return content with the phrase "marketing advice".

Search for content that has certain words, but not necessarily all of the words in order. This is the most basic search. Simply enter your search terms. For example: accept credit cards This will search for documents containing the words accept, credit, and cards

Using OR. The OR operator links two terms and finds a matching document if either of the terms exist in a document. To search for documents that contain either "web design" or just "online marketing" use the query: "web design" OR "online marketing"

Using AND. The AND operator says that the search should return content in which all of the search terms are present. To search for documents that contain both "web design" and just "online marketing" use a search like this: "web design" AND "online marketing"

We would appreciate having your voice in the Small Business Community. You can participate in a number of ways.

Start a discussion in our member-to-member forums. By participating in the Small Business Community, our members gain knowledge and connections that give them a competitive advantage in building a successful business. Take advantage of the collective experience and expertise of the community to get small business ideas and help with a specific question or business challenge.

To post your question in our community, in the “Ask the community” section, from the drop-down, select the category that you’d like to post to, then click the “Start a Discussion” button. If you simply want to introduce yourself to the community, please select the “Introduce Yourself” category.

Note: you must be a logged-in member of the community to post a discussion. Please login or become a member to participate.

Share your small business story. Do you have an interesting story to tell related to your small business? Have some advice for other entrepreneurs to help them avoid some of the pitfalls of small business ownership? We invite you to share your story with the Small Business Community. Click the “Share Your Story” link and simply answer the questions in our Share Your Story template.

Answer a question. Are you an expert in a particular area of running and growing a successful small business? Would you like to help other small business entrepreneurs by answering their questions? We would appreciate your expertise in the Small Business Community. Please click the “Answer a Question” link to see a list of the open questions asked by members of the community.

Bank of America is not responsible for user posts and other user content appearing on this website and does not endorse or guarantee the perspectives, the advice, the users, the businesses, or the products or services sold by any users or businesses that appear on this website.